29 November 2016

Richard Baldwin had one goal in writingThe Great Convergence: to change the way you think about globalization. His central argument is that revolutionary changes in communication technology fundamentally changed globalization around 1990, setting in motion a reversal of the “Great Divergence” that had propelled the rise of today’s rich nations from the early nineteenth century. In the excerpt below, Baldwin offers a broader view of the history of trade, industrialization, and growth that sets the stage for his full consideration of the logic of the new globalization.

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When transportation involved wind power by sea and animal power by land, few items could be profitably shipped over anything but the shortest distance. This fact made production a hostage of consumption since people were tied to the land. Production, in other words, was forcibly bundled with consumption.

Globalization can be thought of as a progressive reversal of this forcible bundling. But the bundling was not enforced by shipping costs alone. Three costs of distance mattered: the cost of moving goods, the cost of moving ideas, and the cost of moving people. It is useful to think of the three costs as forming three constraints that limit the separation of production and consumption.

One of this book’s core assertions is that understanding the evolving nature of globalization requires a sharp distinction among these three “separation” costs. Since the early nineteenth century, the costs of moving goods, ideas, and people all fell, but not all at once. Shipping costs fell radically a century and a half before communication costs did. And face-to-face interactions remain very costly even today.

Thinking about why the sequence matters is facilitated by a new view of globalization—what I call the “three cascading constraints” perspective. The new view is best explained by lacing it onto the back of a quick gallop through history.

The Pre-Globalized World and Globalization’s First Acceleration In the pre-globalization world, distance isolated people and production to such an extent that the world economy was little more than a patchwork of village-level economies. Things started to change when the cost of moving goods fell. Transport technologies improved in a process that fostered and was fostered by the Industrial Revolution.

21 November 2016

Two days after nine African Americans were murdered in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of last year, #Charlestonsyllabus started trending on Twitter, with thousands of people using the hashtag to share resources they found helpful in understanding such a horrific event. As Chad Williams, a Professor of African and Afro-American Studies who sparked the exchange later made clear, he was following the example of Georgetown historian Marcia Chatelain, who created the #FergusonSyllabus as a way for educators to share ideas on how to talk about Ferguson in their classrooms.

#Charlestonsyllabus was widely embraced, and from the loose list of works shared on social media there soon emerged an organized and cohesive syllabus, posted online by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). The thoughtful curating that took the materials from a firehose of inspiration to a deliberately constructed learning plan is of course the work academics have always done for their courses, but there was something remarkably open and democratic about doing it in public and online. As Williams has noted, the syllabus is more than a list; “It is a community of people committed to critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.” It’s also now a book available from the University of Georgia Press.

It’s been heartening to see this model of communal thought take hold over the past year, with academics sharing a lead in bringing context and rigor to a public discourse disfigured by news cycles. The Public Books site has been particularly active on this front. In the wake of a Chronicle of Higher EducationTrump 101 syllabus that lacked a diversity of voices, Public Books shared Trump Syllabus 2.0, assembled by historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain. Then, after the Trump Access Hollywood video surfaced in October, making sexual assault and its denial central to the presidential contest, Public Books posted a Rape Culture Syllabus. In introducing it, Laura Ciolkowski made its purpose clear:

Scholars and activists, poets and playwrights have been writing about rape for centuries. What would the conversation around sexual assault, police bias, and the legal system look like if investigators, police officers, and judges read deeply into the literature on sexuality, racial justice, violence, and power? It is in view of this question that the following syllabus is offered as a scholarly resource—and object of critical discussion and debate—on “rape culture” in the 21st century.

Also this fall, the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective produced a Standing Rock Syllabus in solidarity with those working to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. They write:

The different sections and articles place what is happening now in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context going back over 500 years to the first expeditions of Columbus, the founding of the United States on institutionalized slavery, private property, and dispossession, and the rise of global carbon supply and demand. Indigenous peoples around the world have been on the frontlines of conflicts like Standing Rock for centuries. This syllabus brings together the work of Indigenous and allied activists and scholars: anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, and legal scholars, all of whom contribute important insights into the conflicts between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction. While our primary goal is to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, we recognize that Standing Rock is one frontline of many around the world. This syllabus can be a tool to access research usually kept behind paywalls, or a resource package for those unfamiliar with Indigenous histories and politics.

And just this week, a team of historians offered a Prison Abolition Syllabus at AAIHS. Noting the nationwide prison strike, the prominence of Ava DuVernay’s new documentary on the 13th Amendment, and the surging stock prices for corrections-related companies after Trump’s election, the organizers write that the Prison Abolition Syllabus “seeks to contextualize and highlight prison organizing and prison abolitionist efforts from the 13th Amendment’s rearticulation of slavery to current resistance to mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and prison labor exploitation.”

There are other examples (such as the Anna Julia Cooper Center’s Welfare Reform Syllabus), and there are surely more to come. We’re of course happy to see many HUP books and authors listed among the recommended: Crystal Feimster, Estelle Freedman, and Catharine MacKinnon appear on the Rape Culture Syllabus; Ned Blackhawk and Aziz Rana on Trump Syllabus 2.0; Ira Berlin, Stephanie Smallwood, Walter Johnson, and many others on the Charleston Syllabus; and Elizabeth Hinton and Khalil Gibran Muhammad each on more than one. But beyond the satisfaction of seeing these particular books embraced in the public sphere, it’s both gratifying and invigorating to see serious works of scholarship upheld as integral to, as Williams wrote, “critical thinking, truth telling and social transformation.”

15 November 2016

As the first full history of recorded literature from Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph to today’s surging audiobook market, Matthew Rubery’sThe Untold Story of the Talking Book documents a vibrant tradition of audiobooks extending back to the late 19th century, as well as the devices, formats, companies, and government entities that ushered them along. In doing so, the book addresses a number of longstanding questions: What difference does it make whether we read a book with our eyes or ears? Is listening to books really “reading,” or is it something else? What accounts for the curious sense of shame people sometimes feel for listening to books instead of reading them in print?

In the excerpt below, Rubery details early efforts by the American Foundation for the Blind, the Library of Congress, and others to define the purpose and parameters of the talking book. The embedded audio player presents the corresponding section of the audiobook edition of The Untold Story of the Talking Book, read by Jim Denison and available from Blackstone Audio.

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“What Is a Good Talking Book?” was the question posed in 1938 by Talking Book Topics, the AFB’s quarterly magazine. Once the talking book library had been established, its studios began to take an interest in quality as well as quantity. William Barbour, a former Broadway actor working for the AFB, singled out three characteristics: clarity, editorial accuracy, and artistic perfection. Above all, a good talking book faithfully reproduced the original book. “We demand that our readers preserve complete fidelity to the text which they are reading,” wrote Barbour. “We want those who listen to our books to feel that they are hearing exactly what the author wrote.” Exactly: the talking book was treated like the printed book in another medium.

For Barbour and many others, ink-print, talking, and embossed books differed only in conveying information via the eyes, ears, or fingers. The AFB’s policy of bibliographic equivalence assured audiences that they were reading the same books as every one else. This policy also sought to uphold the talking book’s legitimacy by aligning it with a familiar format rather than presenting it as something completely new. Listening to books might offer a pleasure all its own, but, if so, that pleasure was a secondary consideration. The goal was to allow blind people to participate in the same activities enjoyed by other people.

Talking books preserved the printed book’s features or at least a sense of “bookishness.” “Page” was often used instead of “side” to describe records, for example. The talking book was not only a spoken version of the book but also a bookish version of speech. The bibliographic emphasis ensured that talking books would be evaluated in terms of printed ones. Such fidelity rendered the experience of listening to a book as much as possible like that of reading one in print. The AFB embraced fidelity to the point that, in a few cases, narrators were asked to reproduce obvious errors (sometimes even spelling mistakes) in order to ensure that blind readers received the exact same treatment as other readers.

Talking books reproduced every word of the original book. The Library of Congress’s “Specifications for Talking Book Records” insisted that the wording be identical: “The Talking Book edition of any work should conform just as closely as possible to the text of the printed edition.” Scripts likely to be known by heart—the Bible, historical documents, favorite poems—had to be word perfect. Accuracy was stressed to ensure that talking books were treated as equivalent to ink-print ones. For instance, they recited verbatim the textual apparatus (front matter, acknowledgments, and so forth) skimmed or skipped altogether by the typical reader. The narrator of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy spent thirteen hours on the fifty-six-page index alone. Chapter headings, epigraphs, and other paratextual features likewise had to be read aloud; manuals instructed narrators to read footnotes at once since records had no page breaks. Educational recordings even cited page numbers in order to convey the source book’s layout.

31 October 2016

Charles Maier’sOnce Within Borders is a history of the organization of the earth’s surface by law, war, commerce, and technological change. Intertwined with but distinct from a history of the state, the book is a history of territory, the underlying framework that makes states possible. In the passage below, excerpted from the book’s Introduction, we begin to see how examining the logic of territoriality can throw new light on the making of history from geography.

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Territory—an idea that seemed to have fallen into genteel disuse—has intruded into our lives with a renewed and menacing urgency. It refers to a geographic space, set apart from others by law and boundary. Until recently we could take territory for granted; it was protective and offered security and belonging, with less and less self-conscious effort. After the end of the Cold War, Europeans and Americans tended to believe that territorial priorities had become anachronistic, subsisting mostly among stubborn peoples in the Balkans or the Middle East or as a stake in East Asia. Now the security that territory once offered seems precarious everywhere and to be maintained only with constant surveillance.

The new sense of vulnerability rarely arises from traditional international rivalries as it used to. Rather, all our customary homelands seem assailed by global trends that transgress once reassuring borders and spatial stability—by threats of terrorist attacks, uprooted refugees, tidal flows of international capital, the scary spread of new diseases, and the threat of climate change oblivious to frontiers. Peoples who have long enjoyed territorial security no longer feel sheltered. Some seek new and nonspatial defenses; others mobilize to reaffirm boundaries under threat. And in many places, groups that have never possessed territorial security are prepared to kill and die for it. Territory is not what it was, but it remains indispensable.

Territory is not just land, even extensive land. It is global space that has been partitioned for the sake of political authority, space in effect empowered by borders. Territories allow people to be governed or taxed or imbued with loyalty by virtue of their shared spatial location, not their race or their kinship ties or their faith or their professional affiliation. Territory has been a major sociopolitical invention.

We have a sense of why territory has become precarious in recent times. But how did this spatial sheltering of group life emerge, flourish, and then perhaps decay? Can we write a history of territory as a central attribute of human society? Certainly we can research and write the history of particular territories, small or extended: of city-states and vast empires, Luxemburg or Russia. But until recently territory as such has had little attention from historians, although geographers and political scientists have reflected on its evolution.

24 October 2016

After years of growing step by step, the Loeb Classical Library takes a leap this month. As General Editor Jeffrey Henderson explains below, the publication of the nine-volumeEarly Greek Philosophycollection is a significant advance for both the Library and the field.

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For the 2016 fall season, and at the start of its third year online, the Loeb Classical Library welcomes an edition extraordinary in size, scope, and ambition. Early Greek Philosophy by Glenn Most and André Laks—at nine volumes our largest anthology, our first multi-volume series to be published all together, and our only edition consisting entirely of fragments and testimonia—is not merely a translation and a reference collection but a bold and innovative work of scholarship that greatly enhances our understanding of the earliest stages of the Western intellectual tradition. EGP represents a wholesale advance on Diels-Kranz (unrevised since 1952) and all other editions.

Finally retiring the conventional but misleading label “Presocratics,” EGP updates and significantly broadens the scope of an already vast corpus by including recent finds (notably the Strasburg papyrus of Empedocles and the Derveni Papyrus) as well as a selection of what can be called the pre-philosophical representations of the world and of human beings, not only from Homer and Hesiod but also from other archaic texts, classical drama both tragic and comic, notionally “sophistic” thinkers, and early medicine, especially the Hippocratic corpus, whose relations with the contemporary discipline of philosophy are particularly close. The whole freshened corpus is reorganized so as to clarify as never before its principal themes and trends, with authors grouped by P (personal information), D (doctrine), and R (reception), and corpora by the thematic organization that best showcases each. Finally, EGP presents an overview of the reception of these thinkers until the end of antiquity.

There are also noteworthy technical features. For the first time, translations from lost Greek writings are reproduced in the original Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Armenian; boldface text clearly distinguishes what there is good reason to attribute directly to the original work, as distinct from paraphrases or reports; there is a descriptive index of the potentially unfamiliar “other persons” who cite the passages or are mentioned in the entries; and there is a glossary that explains those of the most significant Greek and Latin terms that seem to require a special explanation. These features, together with well-judged textual and explanatory annotation and cross-references, keep the interconnectedness of the whole constantly in view, so that all nine volumes are made to be used, and thus published, together.

The publication of EGP prompts reflection on the recent evolution of both the Library and its readership. James Loeb’s original promise in 1912 was to make generally available “all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature,” and for a long time that meant extant and more or less mainstream authors. George Goold, my predecessor as General Editor, once compared the Library to the public exhibition area of a great museum: in the storerooms are many more artifacts for specialists to study and enjoy, but in the public areas are placed only the most important and most meaningful pieces. But over time what counts as important and meaningful to scholars and general readers does change. In recent years, alongside revisions or replacements of works by familiar authors such as Caesar and Plato have been added works by the likes of Macrobius and Philostratus as well as many volumes of fragments, both to complete our editions of extant authors and to add authors whose work does not survive intact.

Loeb designed our volumes to be trim and portable, elegant, legible, easy to use, unconfusing, and unintimidating, so that it is easy to overlook just how much information can be packed into their small facing pages. The unfamiliarity of authors like Macrobius and the complexity of editions like EGP present unusual challenges of presentation and format, but the constraints of Loeb’s design continue to prove workable, and well worth the effort to accommodate when they inspire editions such as John Ramsey’s fragmentary Histories of Sallust, with its remarkably resourceful and efficient system for rendering a voluminous and hugely complex tradition both accessible and authoritative, and such as EGP, with its clear shaping and mapping of an otherwise intimidating terrain.

And so, five years after our centenary and two years after the launch of loebclassics.com, Loeb’s dual spirit of tradition and innovation—in material, in medium, in mode of presentation—continues to grow and thrive. Who knows what the next hundred years will bring?

17 October 2016

Q: Hardy is famous as a regional writer isn’t he, as the creator of Wessex?

A: Well, yes, but did you know that the first novel in which he uses the term consistently is The Hand of Ethelberta, which is set largely in London. It occurs 16 times there! It was only very gradually that Hardy came to realize the potential of the concept of Wessex – in fact a London-based friend called Kegan Paul realized it first: in 1881 (Hardy was at this time living in the London suburb of Tooting) Kegan Paul wrote a long article for a London paper on Hardy’s creation of Wessex, and even advised Londoners to visit Dorset and seek out the originals of Hardy’s mythical country. The whole Wessex-themed tourist industry, you might say, was dreamed up by a London publisher and journalist – rather as the ‘ploughman’s lunch’ we are eating in this faux-rustic pub in Shepherd’s Bush was dreamed up by a London-based ad firm in the 1950s.

Q: Hmm, pass that authentic rural pickle, will you? But doesn’t that make Hardy seem a bit of sham?

A: Here you go … No, not at all – he was a realist. He couldn’t get his first novel, which was largely set in London, published, and had to pay for his second to be issued by a pretty dodgy publisher, Tinsley – he lost about £15 on the deal in the end. He came to understand the London publishing industry and what it wanted. He turned himself into a London professional. You’ve got to understand he came from a pretty poor background – indeed his mother’s mother had received poor relief. His parents invested a lot in him becoming a successful architect, and his mother was not at all happy when he became a novelist. A very risky trade. Plus he had to support a middle-class wife on what he earned from his books. There’s a great scene in Tess when Angel and Tess load the Talbothays milk on to a train bound for London, and Angel says it will be ‘watered down’ by the time it reaches Londoners’ breakfast tables. Hardy’s probably surreptitiously talking about the accommodations he had to make with the London publishing industry here.

Q: So you are saying he wouldn’t have become the novelist – and the poet – that he did if he hadn’t gone to London? Do you want another pint of Harvester’s?

A: No more mead for me … Absolutely. No question. Those five years in London in his early twenties were crucial. In many ways they ended in failure, though he did write some wonderful poems, such as ‘Neutral Tones’, and he educated himself in this period, very strenuously indeed, which led to the breakdown of his health. The key thing, though, was – when he went back to Dorset he had been urbanized, or one might say modernized – he understood what Tess calls ‘the ache of modernism’. He was a native returning – and it was the distance between himself and the region where he’d grown up that allowed him to convert it into Wessex.

Q: If he liked London so much, why didn’t he write about it more?

A: Well, journeys to and from London, by train – the railway reached Dorchester when Hardy was eight – are crucial to lots of the novels, particularly Desperate Remedies, A Pair of Blue Eyes, The Hand of Ethelberta and The Well-Beloved. Not, I concede, his most famous novels, but all four are wonderful in their different ways. And he wrote over 50 poems set in London, including some of his very best, such as ‘Coming Up Oxford Street: Evening’ and ‘The Woman I Met’, which is about an encounter with the ghost of a London prostitute. And the Life, his autobiography, has dozens of anecdotes, observations, accounts of London life – in fact it’s really almost as much about his life in London as in Dorset. And of course, after Tess, he was practically the most famous writer on the planet – maybe Kipling was a bit more famous. He got invited everywhere, and beautiful hostesses courted him, and he’d fall in love with them, but none would go as far as he seems to have wanted them to go. He and Emma would spend the four months of ‘the Season’ in London almost every year. One year they even took their own servants up with them. And from the 1890s onwards Wessex pilgrims streamed down to Dorchester from the capital, following Kegan Paul’s advice – and many would ring the doorbell at Max Gate and ask if they could have tea with their favourite rural novelist – only to be told he was up in London – likely as not attending some exclusive soirée in Kensington!

Q: What an extraordinary life!

A: It really was. And this Dick Whittington aspect has been overlooked because it doesn’t fit in with the myth of Wessex. But that’s sort of what it was – coming to London led to the making of him … or so I argue … but he was always ill there, and nearly died when he and Emma were living in Tooting, and he realized that there was a ‘mechanical’ aspect to the novels he wrote when living there at the end of the 1870s. He couldn’t live there, but he depended on it for his livelihood. In this sense he really was, as he put it in a letter to Edmund Gosse after he grew too old and ill to make it up to the capital, ‘half a Londoner’! All this talking has made me thirsty again – I think I’ll have a pint of London Pride.

12 October 2016

In the wake of the two grand jury decisions to refuse to indict police officers in the homicides of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island, a protest was organized for Saturday, December 13, 2014, in New York City. The organizers of the Millions March set up a Facebook page, where, by the night before, more than 45,000 people had RSVPed. It was posted as a public event on Facebook, so everyone and anyone could see who had signed up to attend—providing everyone and anyone, including the social media unit of the New York City Police Department, a costless, pristine list of all the individuals who feel so strongly about the problem of police accountability that they are willing to identify themselves publicly.

It takes little imagination to think of the ways that such a list could be exploited: As a background check during a police-civilian encounter or stop-and-frisk. As a red flag for a customs search at the airport, or a secondary search at a random checkpoint. As part of a larger profile for constructing a no-fly list, or for attributing a lower priority to a 911 emergency call. For more aggressive misdemeanor arrests in neighborhoods that have higher concentrations of protesters. As part of a strategy to dampen voter turnout in certain precincts. For a cavity search in case of arrest. There are myriad creative ways to misuse the data; our imagination is the only limit. And with a single click, a prying eye can learn everything about each of the digital selves that signed up for the protest on Facebook; using a simple selector, an intelligence analyst could collect all of the digital information about any one of those signatories, read all their emails, attachments, wall posts, and comments, decipher their political opinions and engagements, scan their photos and texts, target their videochats, track them by cell phone location—in sum, follow their every movement and digital action throughout every moment of their day. Once we are identified, we can be relentlessly monitored across practically every dimension of our daily routine—by means of the GPS on our phones, our IP addresses and web surfing, our Gmail contacts, MetroCards, employee IDs, and social media posts.

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters.

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Instagram had provided Geofeedia access to the Instagram API, a stream of public Instagram user posts. This data feed included any location data associated with the posts by users. Instagram terminated this access on September 19, 2016.

Facebook had provided Geofeedia with access to a data feed called the Topic Feed API, which is supposed to be a tool for media companies and brand purposes, and which allowed Geofeedia to obtain a ranked feed of public posts from Facebook that mention a specific topic, including hashtags, events, or specific places. Facebook terminated this access on September 19, 2016.

Twitter did not provide access to its “Firehose,” but has an agreement, via a subsidiary, to provide Geofeedia with searchable access to its database of public tweets. In February, Twitter added additional contract terms to try to further safeguard against surveillance. But our records show that as recently as July 11th, Geofeedia was still touting its product as a tool to monitor protests. After learning of this, Twitter sent Geofeedia a cease and desist letter.

Because Geofeedia obtained this access to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as a developer, it could access a flow of data that would otherwise require an individual to “scrape” user data off of the services in an automated fashion that is prohibited by the terms of service (here and here). With this special access, Geofeedia could quickly access public user content and make it available to the 500 law enforcement and public safety clients claimed by the company.

Social media monitoring is spreading fast and is a powerful example of surveillance technology that can disproportionately impact communities of color. Using Geofeedia’s analytics and search capabilities and following the recommendations in their marketing materials, law enforcement in places like Oakland, Denver, and Seattle could easily target neighborhoods where people of color live, monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as “overt threats.” We know for a fact that in Oakland and Baltimore, law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests.

30 September 2016

The big-budget Hollywood take on the 2010 explosion of the offshore drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon opens today. Directed by Peter Berg and featuring Mark Wahlberg, the film arrives as a star-driven disaster movie, suspensefully depicting events that included the deaths of eleven men, the destruction of a half-billion-dollar drilling platform, and the worst human-made ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history.

As is frequently the case with big productions, where the film ended up isn’t where it was always headed, and initial director J. C. Chandor had a different vision for the story before being replaced over “creative differences” with the studio. Chandor’s plan was apparently to tell the story from the perspective of “everyone that was on the rig,” with an ensemble cast of over one hundred people. It’s worth noting that, according to a new analysis of the disaster by two senior systems engineers, Chandor’s version was on the right track.

A system is a collection of components developed more or less independently—plus the people who operate them. Two things make it a system: it has an intended purpose, and it exhibits what systems engineers call emergent properties. An emergent property is something that arises from the interaction between components rather than from the behavior of a single one. Emergent properties are things like safety, security, and reliability. They are typically important and hard to quantify.

Emergent properties suggest the possibility of emergent events: events that result from a combination of decisions, actions, and attributes of a system’s components, rather than from a single act or from the failure of a single piece of equipment. The Horizon disaster was the very model of an emergent event.

A systems analysis resists the tendency to focus on a single cause, an urge so common, and so misleading, that it has a name: “root cause seduction.” That seduction, write Boebert and Blossom, “is typically at the heart of efforts to assign blame or liability rather than prevent future accidents.”

26 September 2016

In the late 1950s Chuck Berry was defining rock and roll, but by the time Jimi Hendrix died in 1970 the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable. What happened in the interim is the subject of Jack Hamilton’sJust around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination. The book explains how, when, and why rock and roll music “became white,” and in doing so offers an interracial counter-history of Sixties music that rejects the ideals of racial authenticity, denies generic divisions between “rock” and “soul,” and “hears together” artists that have typically been separated by critical and commercial force.

We asked Hamilton to put together a playlist of some of the music threaded through the book. The songs he chose and his comments on their significance are below.

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Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind” Dylan’s 1963 composition, the melody of which is borrowed from a 19th-century anti-slavery song, became an anthem of the civil rights movement and arguably the most famous musical work of the 1960s folk revival.

Sam Cooke, “Bring it on Home to Me” (Live) This electrifying live recording from Miami’s Harlem Square Club in 1963 finds Cooke in full-throated, gospel-infused showmanship.

Sam Cooke, “Blowin in the Wind” (Live) This 1964 performance from Manhattan’s Copacabana, recorded and released just a few months before Cooke’s death, shows a completely different side of the singer’s versatility, as Cooke suavely reworks Dylan’s folksong into a gently swinging nightclub number.

Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come” Cooke’s most famous composition and one of the most powerful musical works of the civil rights movement, “A Change is Gonna Come” was released in 1964 and directly inspired by both “Blowin’ in the Wind” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone” Widely regarded as one of the most important recordings in pop music history, Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” became a smash hit in summer of 1965 and decisively marked the singer’s transition from folk revivalist to full-blown rock icon.

Lonnie Donegan, “Rock Island Line” Donegan’s frenetic version of Leadbelly’s classic “Rock Island Line” shot up the British charts in early 1956 and sparked what would come to be known as the “Skiffle Craze,” a brief, intense musical happening that had drastic ramifications on the future of rock and roll in the UK.

The Rolling Stones, “Not Fade Away” One of the Rolling Stones’ earliest hits came in the form of this pounding 1964 cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” which finds them reworking Holly’s composition in the style of Bo Diddley.

Barrett Strong, “Money (That’s What I Want)” The first single ever released by what would soon be known as Motown Records, this unbelievably infectious paean to capitalism is the perfect musical microcosm of Berry Gordy’s upstart label.

The Beatles, “Money (That’s What I Want)” The last track on the Beatles’ second album, With the Beatles (1963), this snarling, punk-ish cover version of Strong’s hit offers an early indication of the massive impact of Gordy’s label on the Fab Four (the fourteen tracks on With the Beatles included three Motown covers).

The Beatles, “Rain” Paul McCartney’s bass playing on this extraordinary 1966 b-side to “Paperback Writer” shows the remarkable influence of Motown session bass player James Jamerson on the Beatles’ mid-1960s music.

Marvin Gaye, “Yesterday” Gaye’s stunning 1970 cover of one of the Beatles’ most famous compositions came at the cusp of a major turning point in the singer’s career; just a year later he would release his masterpiece, What’s Going On, the last major Motown album recorded in Detroit.

Stevie Wonder, “We Can Work It Out” Similar to Gaye’s “Yesterday,” Wonder’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ 1965 hit completely reimagines the original song and foreshadows Wonder’s own emergence as arguably the most influential recording artist of the 1970s.

Aretha Franklin, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)” The Queen of Soul, in all her splendor: Franklin’s breakthrough hit for Atlantic Records in 1967 heralded the arrival of a transformational talent onto the landscape of 1960s pop.

Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart” Joplin’s incendiary version of “Piece of My Heart,” a song originally recorded by Aretha Franklin’s sister Erma in 1967 and remade by Joplin in 1968, was one of Joplin’s biggest hits and remains one of her most iconic performances.

Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man” The British “blue-eyed soul” star Springfield’s evocative rendition of John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins’ composition, the biggest hit from her classic 1968 album Dusty in Memphis, is one of the more beguiling and beautiful recordings of late-60s R&B.

Aretha Franklin, “Son of a Preacher Man” Hurley and Wilkins had originally written “Son of a Preacher Man” for Franklin, who turned it down; after Springfield had a hit with it, in 1970 Aretha recorded it herself in a churning, gospel-infused style.

Aretha Franklin, “Eleanor Rigby” Franklin’s 1970 recording of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” transforms the song from an elegiac, string-octet dirge into a rollicking, bluesy statement of feminist resilience.

Jimi Hendrix, “All Along the Watchtower” Hendrix’s 1968 recording of Bob Dylan’s composition is one of the guitarist’s most famous performances and one of the most iconic musical markers of Vietnam-era tumult and dread.

Jimi Hendrix, “Machine Gun” Recorded live at Madison Square Garden on the very cusp of the 1970s, “Machine Gun” is one of Hendrix’s most explicitly political compositions and one of the more powerful pieces of anti-war music to emerge from the Vietnam era.

The Rolling Stones, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” After an ill-fated flirtation with psychedelia, 1968’s “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” breathed new life into the Rolling Stones, and remains one of the most influential rock and roll singles of all time.

The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man” One of the standout tracks on the Stones’ 1968 album Beggars Banquet, “Street Fighting Man” transports Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 classic “Dancing in the Street” into the global unrest of the summer of 1968.

The Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter” This 1969 duet between Mick Jagger and the great black female vocalist Merry Clayton is one of the most visceral depictions of war and terror in all of popular music.

The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar” The critic Robert Christgau once described this 1971 hit as “a rocker so compelling it discourages exegesis”; stunning, wild, and outlandishly offensive, it is perhaps the quintessential song of the Rolling Stones’ long and complicated career.

22 September 2016

Stephen Burt’sThe Poem Is You is, in the author’s words, a “new kind of guide to the profuse, diffuse magnificences of American poetry now.” Running chronologically from a 1981 John Ashbery poem through a Ross Gay piece from just last year, the volume collects sixty poems that together reflect the demographic and stylistic variety of contemporary American poetry, pairing each with an original essay on how and why it works. One of Burt’s selections comes from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, a provocative meditation on race that challenged readers at a moment when the precarity of black life in America was laid bare.

Likely no book of poetry—no book designated as poetry—in the United States in the twenty-first century has received as much attention, discussion, and debate as Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), from which these paragraphs come. They occupy exactly one page of the meticulously designed book, which includes other anecdotes like this one; sparse pronouncements and queries in verse (“How to care for the injured body, // the kind of body that can’t hold / the content it is living?”); evocative, more conventionally lyrical blocks of prose; essays on racial stereotypes in sports, such as those that vex Serena Williams; and multipage “scripts” for short videos, co-created with Rankine’s husband John Lucas, about instances of deadly racial injustice: Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six. Printed (like museum catalogues) on glossy, photography-friendly paper, Citizen also incorporates visual elements: a two-page work of graphic art by Glenn Ligon, whose text repeats Zora Neale Hurston’s apothegm “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND”; a color photograph of the 2007 Rutgers University women’s basketball team; J. M. W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” (with which the book ends).

These elements—and the near (though not total) absence of self-contained units in verse—trouble the bounds of the category “poetry,” to which its author and publisher say that Citizen belongs. Yet Citizen was a finalist in poetry for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and in Britain the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The National Book Critics’ Circle nominated the book in two categories, poetry and criticism. Rankine won the Forward Prize, the L. A. Times Prize, and the NBCC award in poetry, as well as the PEN Open Book award and the NAACP’s Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry, as well as several other awards. And very sensibly so, if “poetry” means a text that brings together the many aspects of language in order to explore someone’s, or anyone’s, interior life, to challenge the transparency of common language, and to do something that mere exposition or narrative could never do. Rankine’s wary, exasperated, outraged book, taken all in all, asks (and gives no one answer) how she and other people ought to respond to stereotypes and assumptions around race, the overt violence, the tacit self-regulation, the assumptions and attitudes and awkwardness, from thoughtless snubs to hate crimes, that race and “anti-black racism” (the term Rankine uses in interviews) can produce.

The book appeared at a horrifyingly appropriate moment. Completed after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer, the book was published just before the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Eric Garner in Staten Island, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore; the protests in Ferguson; and the sudden national attention, in white-controlled mass media, to black men’s deaths at the hands of police. All the parts of Citizen ask how and whether a black person, or a person whom others identify as black, can live as a citizen, equal to other citizens, protected by custom and law: much of the book explores the common assumption that a black person in a historically white, privileged space—Wimbledon’s tennis courts, or a suburban street—amounts to a dangerous anomaly. That idea helped kill Trayvon Martin. What else does it do to the people who harbor it? What kinds of contradictions, nervous ness, wariness, expectations of anger, passivity, self-defense, or violence does it entail? How often do white people perpetuate racism without realizing it? Can poetry help them realize it? Should this dark-skinned Jamaican American poet care? Can poetic language speak to what Rankine has called her “visceral disappointment ... in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived”?

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.